How Many Number Three Men Does Al Qaeda Have?

Michael Froomkin directs us to First Draft, where we learn that Al Qaeda's number threes include:

• Abu Faraj al-Libbi
• Saif al-Adel
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• Mohammed Sheikh Mohammed
• [a] senior operational leader, who gave Faris his orders... identified in court documents as 'C-2'

Comments

[cooper]

Does anybody else get the feeling this is like a rotating extra spot? Being the number three man in al Qaeda is like beaming down to a planet in a red shirt with Kirk and Spock.

[derek]

Maybe they've taken a tip from American corporations, and everybody in al-Qaeda is number three of something, like "Vice President of Facilities Management" (Janitor).

Who is Number Six?

[Ricardo Montalban]

Being the number three man in al Qaeda is like beaming down to a planet in a red shirt with Kirk and Spock

You mean the standard interchangeable/expendable crew member? "He's dead, Jim".

[jd]

You've been assigned to security on the Enterprise?? I hope that your life insurance is paid up!

[ed_finnerty]

Spock, Bones, Scotty, officer Bullseye meet me in the transporter room

[Unstable Isotope]

Yeah, al-Libbi was so high up in al Qaeda that he wasn't even on the FBI's 75 most wanted terrorists list. We had never even heard of him until his arrest, unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Binalshibh.

[steve]

"I am the new Number 3, Number 6..."

[Bruce Moomaw]

Of course, if real events follow the course of that show, it will turn out that Bush himself is giving Bin Laden his orders. (In that connection, Harry Turtledove has a snide little story in the latest "F&SF Magazine" about how the two men, having finally realized how deeply they depend on each other, decide to get married and fly to Massachusetts for the ceremony.)

Getting back to reality, what the publicity about this latest supposed Number Three really shows is how deeply Bush and Musharraf depend on each other, and how much mutual political backscratching they are willing to do in the name of that dependency. Of course, any other president might well end up doing the same thing, given our justifiable terror that Musharraf will lose control and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal will fall into the hands of Al Qaida...

[bryan]

the ability to continually produce number threes but never catching number one reaffirms my belief that this whole setup is in as close a correspondence with reality as a certain tv show is.

[billy thomas]

we should still smoke them out of their holes, 3rd string or not.

[jerry]

Careful what you write, you may just be the next number three.

[Walt Pohl]

It's like the 60s British TV show "The Prisoner" -- there's a new Number Three every week.

[tante aime]

Michael, Your Mother's Calling You

http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/000706/38/

Ropinrole(TM) was just approved by FDA for
RLS, or "restless leg syndrome", originally
known as GOAP, or "go out and play" unease,
a nervous twitch accompanying being trapped
indoors having to listen to this spook s--t.

Health magazines predict a booming market
for Ropinrole among the younger crowd of
skateboarders, surfers, BMX and MTbikers,
preparing them to USMC saddle up and start
shooting, George Bush "let's roll" style.

The real terrorists are in our government.
US Corporatism is only slightly more benign
than Buchenwald's treatment of its workers.
The Axis of Evil is just a diversion tactic.
{And don't forget C-2's handler, C-3P-O! %}

When was the last time you heard anything
about BSE, flu, Hep or the AIDS pandemics?
When was the last time you heard discussed
the cocktail of mood suppressors used in
American nursing homes to keep the folks
addled-brained, but still receiving their
Medicare bene's? Don't kill the golden goose!!

(Everyone should spend a day in a nursing home,
because that's where we'll all be warehoused,
with our WiFi PDA's taken away, rolled in front
of the widescreen TV and dosed with Rohypnol.
Better, visit and get to know the inmates, and
watch how fast they mentally deteriorate there.)

Americans pay nearly twice as much for their
drugs, have twice as many "syndromes" foisted
on them, and take nearly twice as many pills,
or are forced to, than in any other country.
We are all just FDA's Dr. Mengele guineau pigs.
(Hey, that one's twitching over there ... stat!)

--------

"On June 9, 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, Deputy Director of Research and Technology for the Department of Defense, appeared before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations to request funding for a project to produce a synthetic biological agent for which humans have not yet acquired a natural immunity. Dr. McArtor asked for $10 million dollars to produce this agent over the next 5-10 years. The Congressional Record reveals that according to the plan for the development of this germ agent, the most important characteristic of the new disease would be "that it might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease". AIDS first appeared as a public health risk ten years later, appearing first in a population of gay men who had been subjects in a test of a new Hepatitas vaccine. In 1989, work by Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D. linking AIDS to the hepatitis B viral vaccine experiments was suppressed at the 1989 AIDS International Conference by officials of the World Health Organization."

The Hudson Institute, a right-wing think-tank, continues to pump out Michael Fumento's jingoisms on the myth of heterosexual AIDS, allegedly to focus healthcare efforts on the most at-risk groups, but in reality to limit any attention to AIDS at all, like Bush's promise of $B's to combat African AIDS made to Kofi Annan before Iraq War II, solely to get the UN's buy-in, then Bush reneged on his pledge, and smeared Annan with Food for Oil, as the right-wing's wholely racist final slap in the face.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Fumento20050414.shtml

Incompetent dancing monkeys the NeoAnderthal's may be,
but they are still progressing their agenda, hup-2-3-4,
and they are still winning the covert psy-ops battles,
even as our American economy goes Weimar Republic on US.

[ed_finnerty]

Of course the timing of the capture was convenient - a couple of hours after the irbil massacre of police recruits.

[Ereshkigal]

Maybe this just means that Al Qaeda promotes from within the organizational ranks. Number 3 position empties, number 3 position opens for applicants. No women, of course-- but then, you don't need a glass ceiling if you have a stone floor.

[pgl]

Anyone recall the show "The Prisoner". Never got to see #1 but there were several #2's. I always thought that show was years ahead of it's time. "They've given you a number and taken away your name", however, was from "Secret Agent".

[Weco]

Personally, I prefer to use the Spinal Tap Drummer analogy. Star Trek's deaths are usually pretty boring.

Imagine turning on CNN and the anchor says: CIA has announced that Number Three of Al Aqauda has spontantaneoulsy combusted.

Or a freak gardening accident.

[cymack]

Marvelous! Was just about to drop a little reply to "Anyone recall the show "The Prisoner". " when I saw the renege article.

This is just the kind of bankruptcy all of that mystery and faux spookiness in "The Prisoner" was meant to disguise. Recall that in the end, Number 6 was basically just allowed to walk away, rather like some of the men being released from various gulags nowadays with a simple "Never mind". Just about the slickest thing ever to go over the airwaves.

[Basharov]

"Yeah, al-Libbi was so high up in al Qaeda that he wasn't even on the FBI's 75 most wanted terrorists list."

Now, now, the administration flunky who was defending this had a very reasonable explanation as to why he wasn't on the "wanted" list: "We didn't want him to know he was wanted." Who knew that the FBI is given to such moments of Zen?

Oh, and as I remember from watching the last episodes of "The Prisoner," we did finally catch a glimpse of Number One. He turned out to be the chimpanzee who was piloting the escape rocket.